Plug and Play:The Big Picture

Plug and Play: The Big Picture Plug and Play is Microsoft’s strategy to make new hardware devices easier to install and configure. Plug and Play requires both hardware support (devices that can iden­ tify themselves and can be configured via standard software interfaces instead of jumpers or proprietary interfaces) and software support (an operating system that can assign system resources like I/O addresses and IRQs and drivers that obtain these resource settings from the operating system). Microsoft has provided the operating system piece in Windows 95, and Windows 95 also provides the interfaces that drivers use to retrieve resources assigned to their hardware.